Who Isn’t Fascist?

Let’s stop calling political foes and foreign threats the f-word.

Having recently completed a book on fascism, the career of a concept, it seems that all my efforts to lessen the abuse of my key term may go for naught. Fascism will likely live on, not as a resurgent interwar European movement but as a freely bandied about epithet that can be applied to whatever journalists don’t like. The unsuspecting reader of our partisan media will go on being be made to believe that fascists are one or more of the following villains: anti-American jihadists, outspoken opponents of immigration here and in Western Europe, Democratic presidential candidates, Israeli soldiers, homophobic Christians, foreign-policy isolationists, or the nationalist governments of Viktor Orban in Hungary and Vladimir Putin in Russia. This “fascist” list continues to grow—a comprehensive one would be at least twice as long.

Almost all attempts to apply “fascist” as a dirty word entail comparisons that have little or no historical basis but evoke all too predictable responses. Put most simply, we are made to think “Fascism equals Hitler.” By associating what the speaker doesn’t like with the f-word or by making this association by indirection, one links the hated object of one’s attack to Nazi genocide. In his book Liberal Fascism, Jonah Goldberg does not even rely on this implicit equation of bad guys with Nazis. He just plunges ahead and makes the argumentum ad Hitlerum when he compares Hillary Clinton’s economic planning to the policies of Hitler and the Nazi Minister of Labor Robert Ley. We are thereby made to believe that the Democratic Party has turned Hitlerian, and any fool knows what that means.

Someone who should know better than to abuse the term, the Israeli Francophone historian Zev Sternhell, is undoubtedly the world’s greatest authority on French fascism. In an interview with Haaretz last August, Sternhell lashed out against the Israeli bombing of Gaza, which he compared to the behavior of interwar fascists. He asserted that the fascist danger “reached a new peak in Israel during the Gaza operation” and that Israel is now fraught with fascist thinking of the kind that permeated France when Hitler’s armies invaded in 1940. These comparisons are inexcusable for two reasons. One, whatever one may think of the Israeli military operation, those carrying it out were not “fascists”—one may disapprove of the violence unleashed by these soldiers without having to reach for the emotive, ill-fitting f-word. Moreover, France fell in 1940 because the Germans outmaneuvered French armies militarily. The country was not overthrown from within by fascists, and the group that collaborated with the enemy most blatantly during the invasion was the French Communists, who were taking orders from Hitler’s Soviet allies.

Mentioning these facts in response to Sternhell’s abuse of historical parallels seems redundant, given that the writer in question knows the history far better than I. This is what renders his rant all the more remarkable. We are talking about a distinguished historian of fascism who writes brilliantly about his subject when he is not wearing his political hat. Sternhell introduces a sober thought when he reminds us that “there are worse things than fascism.” The Italian fascist regime before it was taken over by Nazi Germany killed “no more than a few dozen” opponents, and those were mostly assassinations that occurred outside Italy, probably without Mussolini’s knowledge. (One might note that while the partisan use of “fascism” has grown exponentially in recent decades, the scholarship on this topic has not degenerated in the same way.)

Attempts to give fascism a presentist focus range from the serious and scholarly to the crassly opportunistic or abysmally ignorant. The historian A. James Gregor at the University of California, Berkeley, may be the most learned of those who treat fascism as a continuing problem, which Gregor identifies with the revolutionary left. According to this view, the influence of Italian fascism is still reflected in developing-world dictatorships that feature national solidarity, a socialist economy, and an authoritarian regime. These Third World regimes also exploit resentment against “plutocratic” Western states with corrupt parliamentary systems, a form of rhetoric that made an appearance in Latin fascist oratory of the 1920s.

The problem with this continuity thesis is that it makes too much of chance parallels, without noticing the radical differences in the societies that gave birth to the regimes compared. Gregor also makes too much of the selective borrowing engaged in by Third World developmental dictatorships that adorn their rule with Western ideological regalia. This borrowing does not mean that non-Western governments are becoming the same as the state or society from whence the borrowing comes. One may even challenge the ascription of the specifically Western reference points “right” and “left” to Third World political entities.

Once we leave the Ivy Tower, any attempt to demonstrate a continuing fascist threat plummets into the absurd. Thus we find parallels drawn between Obama and Hitler because both did favors for their friends, extended comparisons between the Nazis and the American Democrats because both advanced affirmative-action programs, and a juxtaposing of opponents of gay rights and the amnestying of illegals here and in Europe with the Third Reich.

A few facts about what fascism was may help explain what it wasn’t and isn’t. Fascist movements developed on the European continent between the two wars and were a reaction primarily to the revolutionary left but also to the perceived failure of liberal parliamentary governments to respond adequately to a devastating challenge from leftists. Fascist politics seems to have developed most naturally in Latin Catholic countries and drew on corporatist economic concepts that were extracted quite selectively from papal and neo-scholastic documents, as well as from Roman ideas about hierarchy and authority. Not surprisingly, fascist ideas did not resonate well in Protestant individualist societies, a fact that was related not only to the persistence in these places of orderly constitutional governments but also to certain obvious cultural differences. As the British Union of Fascists and its leader, Oswald Mosley, learned in the 1930s, marching around in London in Black Shirts singing the Italian fascist anthem with English lyrics while enjoying Mussolini’s subsidies created more of a curiosity than a powerful national movement.

Despite attempts by the Italian government to generate a fascist internationalism, their movements did not travel well. The fact that fascists stressed an organic national identity limited the outreach of a movement that aimed at the self-assertion of particular states. Unlike the communists and the current brand of American liberal democracy, fascism was never a truly international force. And its development in nations like Italy and Spain, which lagged industrially, made it even less appealing outside of places that claimed a great past but revealed a rather modest present. The idea that advanced nations such as the U.S. erected welfare states because fascist Italy did so borders on the hallucinatory. For better or worse, modern Western democracies tend of their own accord to give birth to huge bureaucratic states that dole out social programs. There is no reason to assume that those who built and expanded such enterprises were dependent on a Latin fascist model.

Nor does the organic nationhood preached by the fascists have anything in common with the appeals to American nationhood and an American global mission that now issue from Republican and neoconservative sources. Unlike American hawks, fascists did not appeal to human rights, nor did they associate their sense of solidarity with any kind of propositional nationhood. Mussolini invoked “Latinity” as the essence of Italian national identity, and to whatever extent he hoped to recreate an Italian empire, he saw himself returning to the Roman past. This effort to return to ancient greatness was a recurrent fascist theme, together with the reconstruction of a social hierarchy that would be adapted to present needs. By contrast, our advocates of American outreach justify their politics as helping to liberate backwards societies from the shackles of tradition. They wish to make other peoples more like late modern Americans—consumerist, individualist, and free of sexism. This distinction is not an attempt to justify either sense of nationhood or the expansionist foreign policy to which it could lead. It simply calls attention to unlike things.

The historian John Lukacs has made the observation that any comparison between German Nazism and Latin fascism should prove definitively that there was no generic fascism. Lukacs’s statement is half true. There was a veritable gulf between Nazism and the tradition of Latin authoritarianism into which fascism fitted as a counterrevolutionary movement pretending to be a radical revolutionary force. Despite the eventual conversion of some Latin fascists to Hitler’s murderous totalitarian ventures, the two were not the same, and most Nazi collaborators in occupied countries were not convinced fascists but opportunistic politicians or military governments that were willing to cooperate with the Third Reich as long as it was winning. Yet there was a generic fascism, and it was Latin, corporatist, and authoritarian and featured a mystical idea of the nation. This fascism was far less radical and less expansive than German Nazism, a movement and regime that borrowed from fascist organizational models but also from the socialist experiment then being tried in Stalin’s Russia.

The general view of fascism as retrograde seems correct, and so are comparisons between fascist rule and Latin authoritarian regimes. One is drawn to this conclusion even after reading all the literature—some of it very persuasive—that argues fascism was revolutionary as well as nationalist and authoritarian. The only way one avoids coming to the conclusion that the Italian fascist regime did not look particularly revolutionary is by distinguishing fascism as a movement from fascism as the interwar Italian government. The first is intellectually exciting but the second seems to have been a pretentiously labeled patronage system. It was tied to a class system and a political culture that became obsolete in the course of the last century.

Mussolini went hopelessly astray in his making of allies in the late 1930s, and by 1943 he became a German puppet. But his earlier rule had been a comic opera affair, hidden behind the ornamental hierarchy of offices that Mussolini had constructed under the supposedly supreme authority of the “State.” Actually, the Duce ruled with his legions of advisors, while trying to get along with all classes. The attribution to his administration of totalitarian qualities has been much exaggerated. And so was the mistaken judgment made by, among others, FDR and Churchill that Mussolini ran his country efficiently. He managed the Depression by paying off industry to keep the working class employed and the Italian government did so with increasingly devalued money.

Fascism depended on an almost classical Marxist division of classes, with the workers on one side and the owners of productive forces on the other, the lower middle class hovering in between while usually, as Marx predicted, joining the party of order out of a sense of respectability. Marxist analyses of fascism continue to throw light on generic fascism because the revolutionary left and the fascists faced the same social climate. Significantly, this climate and the stratification on which it rested have vanished since the 1930s, even if our media and political propagandists refuse to notice.

The question finally arises as to why we should care if the meaning of fascism remains in freefall. Three answers come to mind. One, it is bad practice to allow what words mean to be decided by semi-literate journalists and political advocates in accordance with their changing interests. Terms that once had clear meanings are reduced to throwaway labels once the wrong people get hold of them. Herbert Butterfield was right when he insisted that one can only begin to understand the reference points of the past by freeing them from the hold of politicians and party hacks.

Two, a questionable belief still reigns that all political evil is of the right. After considerable research, I concluded that fascism was an objectively rightist movement since it was a culturally determined reaction to the revolutionary left. But this does not mean that generic, essentially Latin fascism finds its fullest expression in Hitlerian genocide. The Nazis, who have been falsely turned into the quintessential fascists, were far more revolutionary and more totalitarian than generic fascists. What’s more, the left has been capable of producing its own wicked acts and totalitarian temptations without borrowing anything from the right or the Nazis. Philosopher John Gray has made this point eloquently in the Times Literary Supplement, when he attributes to a failure of the leftist imagination a lack of any awareness of the “radical evil that comes from the pursuit of progress.”

And three, bringing up fascism, which is meant to bring to mind Hitler, is a thoroughly dishonest way to approach our present-day political and social problems. It is an attempt to play on the emotions of the listener to incite us to political or military action. One does not have to like the individuals or groups being targeted to recognize that we are not dealing with the Third Reich in any of today’s examples. Even less when we look at contemporary cases are we dealing the Latin fascists of the 1930s, who were merely a footnote in modern history. Calling something or someone fascist has come to involve emotional blackmail that should no longer be tolerated by the public. It is related to the parallel attempt to compare every foreign-policy crisis to “Munich 1938” before insisting that we send in the U.S. military to handle the situation.

Citing and documenting these false parallels may have some effect, if more people begin to notice this outrageous misuse of the past.

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36 Responses to Who Isn’t Fascist?

Whether we label political ideology and regimes right,left,corporatist, fascist,socialist,communist,progressive,or whatever the various labels represent,it still boils down to the age old conflict of the individual vs. the collective. Whenever and wherever the individual was,by and large,freed up from the yoke of collectivism and allowed to “persue” their happiness under the color of equal law with the rights to property secured then that individual,as well as the society they lived in,made great strides forward materially as well as spiritually. All the other statist or collectivist regimes,by and large,retarded the growth of human progress. In the end,there is very little difference between something called Fascist or some other word that happens to be the “evil” description of the day. It still boils down to collectivism and the age old battle of the individual vs. the collective.

No doubt fascism is most often a convenient epithet rather than accurate description.

The expressions of fascism can be culturally divergent, but do share commonality, namely, merger of government and large capital interests seeking monopoly and diminution of democratic accountability. This does represent an authoritarian political temptation. In this present time, even though a form of financial and military empire is sought, racist nationalism is not overt, even with the primary responsibility for policy implementation primarily being that of one country, nor is it a specifically acknowledged nationalist ideology unlike previous expressions. It appears manifest as an international monied class struggle against egalitarianism.

“the group that collaborated with the enemy most blatantly during the invasion was the French Communists, who were taking orders from Hitler’s Soviet allies.”

That’s a blatant lie. Vichy government, Legion of French Volunteers Against Bolshevism, National Popular Rally, French Popular Party were not Communists. French Communist Party, following orders from Moscow initially took neutral stance on Germans during the occupation, but in 2 moths (since August 1940) took decisivley opposing attitude. For that time, it was organized strike and protests, and since June 1941 they went guerrila. And Francs-Tireurs et Partisans, organized by communists, was a real force in the Resistance! However, at the end of the war:

“Towards the end of the occupation the PCF reached the height of its influence, controlling large areas of France through the Résistance units under its command. Some in the PCF wanted to launch a revolution as the Germans withdrew from the country, but the leadership, acting on Stalin’s instructions, opposed this and adopted a policy of cooperating with the Allied powers and advocating a new Popular Front government.”

And the latter is pretty weird, given that “there was a plan put forth by President Franklin Roosevelt during World War II for an Allied military occupation of France in the aftermath of liberation”, and that General Charles de Gaulle’s, as a self-appointed leader of the Free French Movement, didn’t like it at all

Thank you, Dr. Gottfried, for the necessary corrective. Great piece. To “fascist” I would add “racist” as yet another word which has been decoupled from its historical context only to become rendered essentially meaningless.

Of some interest – in light of the present discussion of fascism – are the original 25 Points of the NSDAP (German Nazi Party). Points 9-21 are of particular interest because they explain how the Nazi and Communist parties voted together on many issues prior to Hitler’s winning the election of 1933 and outlawing the Communist Party:

9. All citizens must possess equal rights and duties.

10. The first duty of every citizen must be to work mentally or physically. No individual shall do any work that offends against the interest of the community to the benefit of all.

Therefore we demand:

11. That all unearned income, and all income that does not arise from work, be abolished.

12. Since every war imposes on the people fearful sacrifices in blood and treasure, all personal profit arising from the war must be regarded as treason to the people. We therefore demand the total confiscation of all war profits.

13. We demand the nationalization of all trusts.

14. We demand profit-sharing in large industries.

15. We demand a generous increase in old-age pensions.

16. We demand the creation and maintenance of a sound middle-class, the immediate communalization of large stores which will be rented cheaply to small tradespeople, and the strongest consideration must be given to ensure that small traders shall deliver the supplies needed by the State, the provinces and municipalities.

17. We demand an agrarian reform in accordance with our national requirements, and the enactment of a law to expropriate the owners without compensation of any land needed for the common purpose. The abolition of ground rents, and the prohibition of all speculation in land.

18. We demand that ruthless war be waged against those who work to the injury of the common welfare. Traitors, usurers, profiteers, etc., are to be punished with death, regardless of creed or race.

19. We demand that Roman law, which serves a materialist ordering of the world, be replaced by German common law.

20. In order to make it possible for every capable and industrious German to obtain higher education, and thus the opportunity to reach into positions of leadership, the State must assume the responsibility of organizing thoroughly the entire cultural system of the people. The curricula of all educational establishments shall be adapted to practical life. The conception of the State Idea (science of citizenship) must be taught in the schools from the very beginning. We demand that specially talented children of poor parents, whatever their station or occupation, be educated at the expense of the State.

21. The State has the duty to help raise the standard of national health by providing maternity welfare centers, by prohibiting juvenile labor, by increasing physical fitness through the introduction of compulsory games and gymnastics, and by the greatest possible encouragement of associations concerned with the physical education of the young.

“[T] word ‘Fascism’ is almost entirely meaningless. In conversation, of course, it is used even more wildly than in print. I have heard it applied to farmers, shopkeepers, Social Credit, corporal punishment, fox-hunting, bull-fighting, the 1922 Committee, the 1941 Committee, Kipling, Gandhi, Chiang Kai-Shek, homosexuality, Priestley’s broadcasts, Youth Hostels, astrology, women, dogs and I do not know what else … Except for the relatively small number of Fascist sympathisers, almost any English person would accept ‘bully’ as a synonym for ‘Fascist’. That is about as near to a definition as this much-abused word has come.”

“After considerable research, I concluded that fascism was an objectively rightist movement since it was a culturally determined reaction to the revolutionary left.”

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Fair enough, but I wonder how does one reconcile that statement distinctly “leftist” (such as the following found on Italian Fascist and German Nazi party platforms):

Nazi Party Platform

-Demanding “that the State shall above all undertake to ensure that every citizen shall have the possibility of living decently and earning a livelihood.”

-“That all unearned income, and all income that does not arise from work, be abolished.”

-total confiscation of all war profits.

-the nationalization of all trusts.

-profit-sharing in large industries.

– a generous increase in old-age pensions.

-the creation and maintenance of a sound middle-class, the immediate communalization of large stores which will be rented cheaply to small tradespeople, and the strongest consideration must be given to ensure that small traders shall deliver the supplies needed by the State, the provinces and municipalities.

-agrarian reform in accordance with our national requirements, and the enactment of a law to expropriate the owners without compensation of any land needed for the common purpose. The abolition of ground rents, and the prohibition of all speculation in land.

– ruthless war be waged against those who work to the injury of the common welfare. Traitors, usurers, profiteers, etc., are to be punished with death, regardless of creed or race.

-The State has the duty to help raise the standard of national health by providing maternity welfare centers, by prohibiting juvenile labor, by increasing physical fitness through the introduction of compulsory games and gymnastics, and by the greatest possible encouragement of associations concerned with the physical education of the young.

Italian Fascist Platform

– Lowering the minimum voting age to eighteen, the minimum age for representatives to twenty-five, and universal suffrage, including for women.

– The abolition of the Senate and the creation of a national technical council on intellectual and manual labor, industry, commerce and culture.

– End of the draft.

– Repeal of titles of nobility.

– A foreign policy aimed at expanding Italy’s will and power in opposition to all foreign imperialisms.

– The prompt enactment of a state law sanctioning a legal work day of eight actual hours of work for all workers.

– A minimum wage.

– The creation of various government bodies run by workers’ representatives.

– Reform of the old-age and pension system and the establishment of age limits for hazardous work.

– Forcing landowners to cultivate their lands or have them expropriated and given to veterans and farmers’ cooperatives.

– The obligation of the state to build “rigidly secular” schools for the raising of “the proletariat’s moral and cultural condition.”

– A large and progressive tax on capital that would amount to a one-time partial expropriation of all riches.

– The seizure of all goods belonging to religious congregations and the abolition of episcopal revenues.

– The “review” of all military contracts and the “sequestration of 85% of all war profits.

There are also some on the left who use the word fascism to mean a kind of corporatism, since fascism involved a corporate council; of course, always forgetting that this included unions.

I think the connotations of the word “fascist” though isn’t really fascism as a political movement per se, whether in organic nationhood, or corporatism, or Nazism. It has to do with the symbol of the fasces, which was also commonly used on American symbology before the war; for example, two fasces are present on either side of the dais in the US Congress. Part of the meaning — through the grouped sticks — is that unity is strength — and part of the meaning — through the ax — is the power over life and death. To call someone “fascist” is to say they carry that sort of politics: everyone must stand behind their politics, and everyone else, who breaks that “unity”, must be punished.

I agree, incidentally, that fascism was right-wing, though also socialist: simply, it was right-wing socialism, which appears to many to be a contradiction in terms, but wasn’t. Fascism was also reactionary, and what reactionary movements do is take revolutionary and radical ideas and turn them in the other direction.

Comparing modern day social welfare programs to classical Italiam fascism is not invalid simply because the Italian model was based on ancient historical precedents. Germany and the Germanic nations had only the HRR on which to build a foundation. America and Britain had no
Real historical foundation upon which to draw.

The Church above all recognized the futility and illusory nature of progressive liberalism. Better to rely upon something with a firm foundation in building or rebuilding society.

Theliberal democratIV West had no cultural historical basis upon which to build. Obviously it is copycat fascism. That is often the very point of the comparison.

Nor does the organic nationhood preached by the fascists have anything in common with the appeals to American nationhood and an American global mission that now issue from Republican and neoconservative sources. Unlike American hawks, fascists did not appeal to human rights, nor did they associate their sense of solidarity with any kind of propositional nationhood. … our advocates of American outreach justify their politics as helping to liberate backwards societies from the shackles of tradition. They wish to make other peoples more like late modern Americans—consumerist, individualist, and free of sexism.

I think that you give way too much credence to the human rights veneer that hawks and neocons use to dress up their interventionist policies – while deftly sidestepping the corporate drivers behind our recent adventures.

For example, the Iraq we invaded actually had a burgeoning middle class, and certainly much less sexist oppression than is seen within many of our allies in the region. The Iran that many in the West want to invade can make the same claim.

And to the extent that consumerism in Saddam’s Iraq and today’s Iran are limited, much of the blame for that can be laid on America’s doorstep, and the punishing sanctions that we have maintained on both nations – and not on the tendencies of the pre-invasion population of Baghdad or the current population of Teheran.

Was the Iraqi invasion primarily about oil? I’ll leave that to the pundits and historians. But imo the decision to occupy, and the way that occupation played out in the first year, has everything to do with America trying to create a country where multi-national corporations could have free reign. It was arguably one of the most powerful demonstrations we’ve ever seen of corporations ability to drive American military policy since the bankers pushed the country into WWI.

Marxist analyses of fascism continue to throw light on generic fascism because the revolutionary left and the fascists faced the same social climate. Significantly, this climate and the stratification on which it rested have vanished since the 1930s, even if our media and political propagandists refuse to notice.

Really? At a time when economic stratification in America is reaching levels not seen in generations, with 10% of Americans owning 75% of our wealth, and the Supreme Court seemingly dedicated to protecting corporate interests above all else – your argument is that economic stratification has “vanished”?

As for me, I still go with Britt’s 14 Characteristics, and leave it to the reader to decide which may apply to American politics:
1) Powerful and Continuing Nationalism
2) Disdain for the Recognition of Human Rights
3) Identification of Enemies/Scapegoats as a Unifying Cause
4) Supremacy of the Military
5) Rampant Sexism
6) Controlled Mass Media
7) Obsession with National Security
8) Religion and Government are Intertwined
9) Corporate Power is Protected
10) Labor Power is Suppressed
11) Disdain for Intellectuals and the Arts
12) Obsession with Crime and Punishment
13) Rampant Cronyism and Corruption
14) Fraudulent Elections

“The Italian fascist regime before it was taken over by Nazi Germany killed “no more than a few dozen” opponents, and those were mostly assassinations that occurred outside Italy, probably without Mussolini’s knowledge. ”

I think that’s a somewhat outdated view of Italian fascism; it ignores the pretty massive crimes committed by Italian forces in Libya and in Ethiopia (where they not only used mustard gas, but also engaged in systematically murdering the country’s elite, not unlike what the Nazis and Soviets would later do in Poland).
It’s very convenient for the Italians to ignore all this (they prefer to forget what happened before September 1943, and like to regard themselves as victims of diabolical German occupiers), but Italian fascism had murderous consequences well before any supposed “corruption” by Nazism. That it “only” caused the deaths of some hundred thousands, not millions, was more a result of the fascists’ incompetence and Italy’s relative backwardness, not of intentions.

Gworraent and Kurt – initially the Nazi Party at least paid lip service to the socialist ideals put forth by Rohm and the SA. They were discarded during the Night of the Long Knives and the socialist points of the early NSDAP were effectively abandoned.

Repeated calls for a revamping of the German social welfare system formed another important point of agreement and cooperation in the Bundestag between the German Nazi Party and the German Communist Party – a point of agreement that Hitler implemented after he came to power in 1933. These changes in the German social welfare system were immensely popular when Hitler introduced them and the core of these programs continues to form the basis for the German social welfare system to this day.

“[In Germany the] social welfare system that developed after unification in 1871 used existing decentralized structures to provide an ever increasing range of benefits…until] the period when Germany was ruled by the regime of Adolf Hitler (1933-45) which established a state-run social welfare program…In 1934 the regime dismantled the self-governance structure of all social insurance programs and appointed directors who reported to the central authorities…In 1938 artisans came to be covered under compulsory social insurance, and in 1941 public health insurance coverage was extended to pensioners. In 1942 all wage-earners regardless of occupation were covered by accident insurance, health care became unlimited, and maternity leave was extended to twelve fully paid weeks with job protection.”

Maybe the confusion between fascism being “left” or “right” can be clarified through an ideal genealogy of fascism and nazism.
Both movement draw from ideals bred by the French Revolution, i.e., nationalism, revolutionarism and progressivism.
In this respect, they are leftist ideologies. For sure, they are at the left of Burke and De Maistre.
On the other hand, Fascims definitely has reactionary features (opposition to communism, to collectivism and, in a lesser way,to progressivism), which are unknown to Nazism (the myth of the German race cannot be identified as a reactionary one, because it didn’t appeal to actual history).
Its opposition to Communism is rather a competition on the same ground.
In this respect, Nazism is better understood as an extreme Left movement, whereas Fascism has mixed features. In my opinion, it can be best seen as a movement adopting leftist policies for reactionary goals.

While for sure Italy committed heinous crimes in its colonial wars, they weren’t crimes of “Fascism”.
They were rather crimes of a late example of “Western Colonialism” and not different from those committed by French, Britons, Belgians, Spaniards and even by the US (e.g., in the Philippines), in the name of a racist ideology, attenuated by a thin veneer of paternalism, which was common currency in the West at the time.
Of course, this doesn’t make any difference for those involved, but is a crucial point to understand things from an historical perspective.

Gottfried’s piece is one of the most accurate and succinct briefs on fascism I’ve ever read. The various fascist movements, in the old world and the new, have almost always arisen in Latin nations.
But in taxonomizing fascism he runs into the usual problem. Austria between 1934 and the Anschluss–under the rule of Dollfuss and Schuschnigg–was manifestly fascist. The Christian Social Party, predecessor party to the ruling Fatherland Front, was a hypernationalist movement formed as a reaction to to the influence of Protestant Prussia, embodying what they considered true German-ness. One might also consider Romania and Hungary as similar cases.
It’s hard to escape the conclusion that a generic fascism is Catholic but not necessarily Latin.

It’s a buzz word used to induce fear. Socialist. Now that’s a word that could use some dissecting when it comes to American politics. It’s very trendy to drop isms, but grasping their relevance in 2015 is daunting.

@Guiseppe Scalas
“While for sure Italy committed heinous crimes in its colonial wars, they weren’t crimes of “Fascism”.
They were rather crimes of a late example of “Western Colonialism” and not different from those committed by French, Britons, Belgians, Spaniards and even by the US (e.g., in the Philippines), in the name of a racist ideology”

You do have something of a point, and yes, France and Spain waged very brutal colonial wars in North Africa (including the use of poison gas) during the 1920s as well. However I think the distinction isn’t all that meaningful, of course Mussolini’s fascism incorporated a lot of “traditional” imperialist, colonialist and racist notions, the two phenomena are connected. In any case, I don’t think the view of Mussolini’s regime as comic opera-like is still tenable, this was a regime that waged wars of aggression (first Ethiopia, later Albania and Greece) and committed serious mass crimes. Of course nothing on the scale of either Nazi or Soviet crimes, but bad enough.

“In 1933, prior to the annexation of Austria into Germany, the Christian population of Germany was 67% Protestant and 33% Catholic. A census in May 1939, six years into the Nazi era and incorporating the annexation of mostly Catholic Austria into Germany, indicates 54% considered themselves Protestant.”

The author’s point that “facist” in current usage is essentially synonymous with “bad guy” is a good one. On the other hand the arguments in this very thread (and everywhere else fascism is discussed) suggest to me that maybe “fascism” isn’t a very useful concept in the first place. It isn’t like a molecule or virus (“x-ray spectroscopy revealed large concentrations of fascism in Hitler’s body”).

Instead, it seems to have originated as a self-applied label used to describe everything a particular group believed. As such, one wouldn’t expect it to be a well-defined, coherent political philosophy, as most peoples’ sets of beliefs aren’t. Additionally, it seems to be a term used by later observers to denote the common set of ideas held by a group of historical states they didn’t particularly like.

One could argue that all political labels or categories have this problem, and to some extent they probably do, but words like “libertarian” or “reactionary” or “communist” seem to have pretty clear definitions, and few people would argue whether some concrete action met the criteria for those labels, like they do with nearly everything surrounding the word “facist”.

Perhaps when trying to avoid making the same mistakes as the Nazis, we are doing ourselves a big disservice by approaching the problem at too abstract or general a level. We may be making ourselves stupid in an attempt to sound smart.

After all, it is absurd to posit a direct causal link between, say, providing people with state-sponsored health insurance and committing pre-meditated mass murder of Jews and Slavs. So it’s probably totally dishonest to invoke the worst Nazi atrocities when arguing about extending (or curtailing) some entitlement program.

On the other hand, when people say they are going to eliminate Kulaks and then start murdering people, or liken Jews to a disease that needs to be eliminated to save the patient, and then start murdering people, it probably gives us cause to worry about people who make similar statements.

Interesting column. But I would argue that for most of us readers, the single most important sentence is:

“it is bad practice to allow what words mean to be decided by semi-literate journalists and political advocates in accordance with their changing interests. Terms that once had clear meanings are reduced to throwaway labels once the wrong people get hold of them.”

Terms like “fascism”, “communism”, “socialism”, and yes, even “capitalism” have specific political and economic definitions which are understood by the political and economic scholars who study such things. But as soon as they are taken out of the realm of academic study and used in and by the general public, they become nothing more than meaningless slogans to be used either as epithets to be hurled at one’s opponents, or as battle flags to rally supporters to one’s side.

Our political discourse would be greatly improved if everyone would just take someone’s statements of beliefs and policies at face value, instead of always trying to attach a label, and then interpreting what they say to make it fit that label.

Fascism is the system of government that cartelizes the private sector, centrally plans the economy to subsidize the producers, exalts the police state as the source of order, denies fundamental rights and liberties to individuals, and makes the executive state the unlimited master of society.

I advise that the author should read Lew Rockwell’s Capitalism Versus Fascism

Other books for this author to consider are:
Liberal Fascism by Jonah Goldberg although he omits the military industrial complex, and Friendly Fascism by Bertram Gross.

I still follow Pat Buchanan because he has remained true to his principles. However, there is a reason why I stopped subscribing to the New American and this article exemplifies why.

This article seems obtuse and is simply to deny what has transpired ever so slowly in the USA – Participatory Fascism.

“Fascism is the system of government that cartelizes the private sector, centrally plans the economy to subsidize the producers, exalts the police state as the source of order, denies fundamental rights and liberties to individuals, and makes the executive state the unlimited master of society.”

Close enough to Mussolini’s own definition, of corporate/state merger.

I’m mostly in agreement with William Marcy’s comment, though he neglected to notice that Gottfried did address Goldberg’s book, “Liberal Fascism”:

“In his book Liberal Fascism, Jonah Goldberg does not even rely on this implicit equation of bad guys with Nazis. He just plunges ahead and makes the argumentum ad Hitlerum when he compares Hillary Clinton’s economic planning to the policies of Hitler and the Nazi Minister of Labor Robert Ley.”

I’ve read other articles like Gottfried’s on fascism, and they are annoying and disappointing, because they spend a lot of time swiping aside “what fascism wasn’t,” but spend precious little talking about what it was. After reading this article, I feel only a little more enlightened about what fascism was than before I read it. I only care about what it wasn’t in comparison to what it *was*. Talking about what it wasn’t without addressing the other is, in my mind, meaningless.

The sense I get from Gottfried is that fascism was defined by an appeal to an ancient past, and was a reactionary response to the success of radical leftism. But this to me is just the “public face” of what fascism was. The only detail he spares on implementation is that the Italian fascists reasserted a strict hierarchy of social classes. What he spends most of his time talking about is the public appeal to it, not what was ultimately implemented once those who believed in it gained power. In fact, he seems to think that paying attention to those details is missing the point. My complaint is he doesn’t compare and contrast fascists policies to current policies. He just swipes aside every attempt to make an analogy between the two.

This casts fascism as mostly a cultural and political movement of a particular character–a form of will to power in reaction to political decay, not a governing philosophy that’s worthy of analysis.

Goldberg’s book seems to focus on the stated goals of fascism, gives a structural critique of what was done in its name, and then makes analogies to today’s politics and policies. These facets to him defined fascism as a governing philosophy, not so much a public appeal, though he gets into that somewhat. This model of analysis has more meaning to me than what Gottfried has just laid out, because it makes an attempt to explain what the effects of fascism were on their respective countries, beyond the political expedients that were used to build public support for it.

Gottfried hints that none of his critique of claims of “fascism” discount the worries about modern day administrative or totalitarian tendencies in current policies, but that we should address them point by point, rather than assigning ill-conceived labels to them. Fair enough, but I think without assigning labels to structural changes to governance, we are left to talking only about pro and con analysis of those policies, referring to data points, not about governing philosophy, and what best supports liberty. Governing philosophy, I think, inevitably gets into historical parallels, and that is not illegitimate. It would’ve been more helpful if Gottfried had spent most of the article talking about the governing philosophies of fascism, and allowed the reader to make up their own mind about whether there are any analogies to be made, or not.

The main point of the article is obvious, but some of the dismissals of the use of ‘fascism’ are perhaps a little too reflexive.

In particular, I’d take issue with the Sternhell issue. What is so obviously wrong about comparing some members of the Israeli military and cabinet with fascists? Israel might not have a traditional Italian corporatist model, but it does have a not-exactly-free market economy dominated by State interference with a national-strategic motivation and the parties to the Right of Likud are more obviously collectivist. It is an ethnonationalist State that some leading members of major political parties take to extremes, even genocidal statements that you would not have heard from Nazis in 1932. Their militarism generally lacks the neoconservatives’ fake (yes, paleoconservatives misjudge this) humanitarian and liberal-democratic basis. There exists a strain of racialism on the Israeli Right that is reminiscent of Nazi science. So, I see no problem in the comparison as it hardly painted all of Israel with one broad stroke. If anything, given the Gaza War was the context, it was a slur on the tamer (in terms of racialist ideology) French Right of the 1930s.

“(France) was not overthrown from within by fascists, and the group that collaborated with the enemy most blatantly during the invasion was the French Communists, who were taking orders from Hitler’s Soviet allies.”

—That’s absurd! Hitler subverted the French General Staff. The French Army was definitely good enough to fight longer than a three-week war, but there was no will for repeating WWI to support a pro-British/Polish foreign policy within the upper brass of the armed forces. The PCF, banned and suppressed in 1939, may have sabotaged some munitions production (mainly before the war) but they did not launch a large-scale campaign of pro-German activity. If you meant Doriot’s PPF, that’s a different story, but he had been excluded from the PCF for four years already.

I agree that America’s neocons and theocons are not fascists exactly, even if they exhibit horrific levels of authoritarianism, imperialism, and a narrow type of racism (currently anti-Arab racism and anti-Muslim prejudice). However, it is certainly the case that many of them support the most fascistic (and in the theocons’ case, theo-fascistic) elements of Israeli politics.

Subsidised ethnofascism for them, a sort of authoritarian neoliberalism for us.